On February 17, 1929, 25-year-old Violet Diancalana died in the home of Katherine Bajda, of complications of a criminal abortion performed on her there that day. Mrs. Bajda, identified as a homemaker, was held by the coroner and indicted for felony murder by a grand jury.
Elsewhere in Chicago on that very same day, 23-year-old Gladys Schaffer died after from a criminal abortion was performed. She died on the spot, in the home of midwife Emma Schulz, where the abortion had been performed. Though evidently Schulz had indeed performed an abortion on Gladys, the coroner determined that Gladys had actually died from an ectopic pregnancy, thus indicating that Shulz had not caused the death. Nevertheless, on April 15, she was indicted for felony murder by a grand jury. Schulz had managed to remain free to ply her abortion trade despite having been arrested the previous year for the death of 23-year-old Lucille Smith.
On February 17, 1949, the battered body of Roberta Shirley Danks, a 28-year-old war widow from Chicago, was found crumpled on a rural road near Chesterton, Indiana. She had bruises over her body and a deep gash on her head, but an autopsy revealed that these injuries had been sustained after her death, evidently to try to make Roberta appear to be the victim of a hit-and-run driver. She had actually died of peritonitis from a criminal abortion performed several days earlier by a physician in the basement of the Chicago home of 40-year-old housewife Olive Janes.
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